Are you old enough to remember Practical Math? Has it gone the way of the eight-track?

And yet I bet many people have difficulty with basic arithmetic, and recently a cashier at
a local Barbeque place thought there were 8 quarts in a gallon of barbecue hash...share your
own anecdote regarding this.

8. I needed your mother.

My parent's were both very good at math - I come from a family full of both amateur and professional maths types (physics, engineering, etc) - but they were also older (born in the early 1920s) and disinclined to have much truck with new math. They made the mistake of believing that the school system knew what it was doing.

Had I struggled, they probably would have identified the problems, but unfortunately my natural ability was my downfall. It looked like I was doing great, but like so many who were damaged by this experiment, it was smoke and mirrors. I was in 8th grade before my parents discovered that I didn't know my multiplication tables; that was the year that they went back to "old math". For five years I was bringing home glowing report cards and lots of shiny gold stars - and suddenly I was an idiot.

It made me fear math - for that I'll never forgive the morons who thought it was a good idea.

7. One of my majors was math so I can be quite anal about things

I just schooled a guy who posted something about how gun deaths in DC made it safer than overseas in Iraq. The propaganda he put up gave you all the numbers you needed to see that the "answer" provided was not true. The claim was that DC had 80.6 deaths per 100,000 for a certain period, and American troops in Iraq had 60, but they gave us the numbers of 2112 deaths per 160,000 troops. So to put it in terms of 100,000 troops you would set up: